1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the design of knowledge portals and, in particular, to designing a knowledge portal for retrieving, organizing and delivering information from computer-based portal data sources to a user belonging to an organization.
2. Description of Related Art
An organization usually has a vast store of knowledge, which may include different forms of public and private data developed within the organization, the knowledge and experience of the organization's communities and employees, and public and private data originating outside the organization. The effective use of this knowledge is critical to the organization's achieving its business objectives. This requires that the right knowledge be readily accessible to individuals within the organization who need that knowledge to perform their duties in support of the organization's objectives.
Individuals within an organization typically cluster into communities such as sales, engineering and manufacturing, whose members share a common base of knowledge, tools, and processes; ways of conceptualizing or organizing that knowledge; and a set of peers with whom they typically network or collaborate. These individuals need, not only access to knowledge, but also the ability to quickly locate the specific knowledge that is directly relevant to the task at hand. However, these users typically have neither the time nor the expertise to: (1) locate all potential sources of the knowledge they need, both within and external to the organization, (2) to quickly identify the precise items of knowledge they are looking for, and (3) to retrieve them from potentially heterogeneous applications.
One way to address these problems is through a knowledge portal. As used herein, a knowledge portal is a computer-based tool that provides knowledge search and retrieval capability to individual knowledge workers who need access to a broad spectrum of knowledge. Ideally, such a knowledge portal retrieves and indexes knowledge from multiple sources and delivers that knowledge to the user organized in a way that is highly relevant and intuitive.
For a knowledge portal to provide the capabilities described above, it must be carefully designed or customized to “know” potentially-relevant sources of knowledge and the most intuitive way to organize that knowledge from the perspective of its individual users, and in the specific business context of the task at hand. Doing so requires a portal design method that strikes an appropriate compromise between the comparatively low relevancy to individual users inherent in an organization-wide “one size fits all” design and the high cost of requiring each individual to invest the resources needed to customize his or her portal.
Bearing in mind the problems and deficiencies of the prior art, it is therefore an object of the present invention to provide an improved method for making the design decisions necessary to create a knowledge portal that will retrieve, organize and deliver computer-based knowledge to a user belonging to an organization from the user's perspective, relevant to the specific business context of the task at hand.
A further object of the invention is to provide a method of designing a knowledge portal that may be used by a community of users in an organization to locate and access critical knowledge for the business processes those communities perform.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide an improved method of designing a knowledge portal in which decisions made remain in alignment with the strategies and priorities of the organization.
Still other objects and advantages of the invention will in part be obvious and will in part be apparent from the specification.